New to @ahrefs ?

Check out these 11 simple (yet actionable) use cases, which will help you get instant value from our SEO platform.
(1) See how much search traffic your competitors get

Every business owner wants to know how their competitors are doing.

Compare your website against your competitors and see which one of you gets more search traffic.
(2) Learn which pages bring search traffic to your competitors

For example, 33.3% of all search traffic to Ahrefs' own blog comes from just 5 articles:
(3) Study what people are searching for in Google

One of the keys to growing your traffic from Google is to study the popular searches in your industry.

This is to ensure you’ll be creating content about things that many people are searching for.
Keywords Explorer helps you discover hundreds of thousands of valuable search queries.

For example, the "Matching terms" report gives you a whopping 558,968 search queries that contain the word “bitcoin” in them:
(4) Gauge the full search traffic potential of a topic

The search volume of an individual keyword can be rather misleading. This is because webpages never rank for just one keyword.

To address that misconseption we have developed a new SEO metric called "Traffic potential."
Traffic potential metric is very simple to understand.

It shows you how much traffic the #1 ranking page for your search query gets in total from all the keywords that it ranks for.

Many seasoned SEOs were doing this manually for quite a while now:
(5) Find critical SEO issues that hurt your website’s performance in Google

Our Site Audit tool will scan your website for over 120 common SEO issues and provide detailed recommendations on how to fix them.
You can also set up recurring website audits and monitor your "SEO Health score" over time.

This is especially useful when there are many people in your company who can make changes to your website and, in doing so, may accidentally break things.
(6) Estimate the ranking difficulty of any keyword

Some keywords are incredibly easy to rank for, while others are pretty much unattainable—even for big, authoritative websites.

But how do you know which is which?

Use our Keyword Difficulty score!
IMPORTANT NOTE!

We don’t advise our customers to make important SEO decisions based on this simple two-digit number ALONE.

The real ranking difficulty of a keyword is much more complex and nuanced than that.

Learn more about it from this post of mine:
ahrefs.com/blog/keyword-d…
(7) Find out where your competitors got their backlinks

One of the most common jobs of an SEO professional is to figure out where the top-ranking pages got their backlinks (and how to get the same backlinks for their own page).

Ahrefs is known as an absolute leader in that 😎
(8) Discover your competitors’ “linkable assets”

Study your top competitors and see which of their pages have attracted the most links.

You can do that using the "Best by links" report in Site Explorer.
(9) Monitor your ranking progress for thousands of keywords

The "Organic keywords" report in Site Explorer will show you nearly all of the keywords that your website is ranking for in Google.

Even my long-abandoned personal blog still ranks #1 for a bunch of keywords it seems:
(10) Find gaps in your content strategy

A “gap” in content strategy is when your competitors are all ranking for important keywords that bring lots of valuable traffic to them while your own website doesn’t target those keywords.

Use "Content Gap" report to study that:
(11) Find hundreds of quality link prospects in seconds

Let’s say you’re doing SEO for a productivity app.

Wouldn’t it be useful for you to get a list of all websites that mentioned the words “productivity app” somewhere in the content?

You can do that in Content Explorer:
That's it! :)

11 simplest and most actionable use cases of Ahrefs that were selected with the SEO newbies in mind.

If you would like to see a more detailed version of this list with a few extra tips and use cases, check out this post on our blog:

ahrefs.com/blog/how-to-us…

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More from @timsoulo

9 Nov
How we FAILED to scale our video content to other languages. 😬

^ A marketing FAILURE story.

(just in case you are tired of shiny success stories in your Twitter feed)
You may (or may not) know that we (@ahrefs) had quite a bit of success with video content.

Ahrefs TV, our YT channel, has 270k+ subscribers as of today and each new video gets tens of thousands of views.

@samsgoh did an INCREDIBLE job there! 💪

So then one day an idea occured to me, which I thought made a lot of sense:

Let's DUB our videos into a few other languages!💡

Sam's videos performed incredibly well in English, so even if dubbing would make them a little less fun to watch, they should still perform well.
Read 12 tweets
28 Sep
How to build backlinks.

A thread for SEO newbies. 🧵
If you want the pages of your website to rank high in Google, you will almost certainly need links.

Links from other websites tell Google that your content is notable and deserves to rank high.

So (generally) the more links you have - the better.

But how/where to get them?
Conceptually, there are just 4 ways to get links:

Add: Manually add links to websites.
Ask: Email website owners & ask for a link.
Buy: Exchange money for links.
Earn: Get links from people who visited your page.

(these come together into a totally un-memorable acronym — AABE)
Read 22 tweets
17 Jun
Let’s talk about “Link Building Outreach.”

I recently tried to acquire some links to one of my blog posts..

So I reviewed ~200 link prospects (collected by a contractor) and sent ~90 emails.

...and it was quite a learning experience to be honest.

[Read more..]
First.. The RESULTS:

🔹 ~200 prospects reviewed;
🔹 ~90 emails sent;
🔹 13 links acquired (a few more might come later);
🔹 14 people wanted some sort of a "deal;"
🔹 3 people said "no."

15% success rate is not too shabby (from what I've heard from my SEO friends).

Soo..
What did I learn in the process?

Quite a few things actually.

But before I share my "lessons" with you, please be advised that what is about to follow is mostly based on my GUT FEELING and perception, rather than any scientific evidence.

No A/B tests were done in the process.
Read 23 tweets
23 Mar
Let's talk about the "ROI of Content Marketing."

Far too often us marketers get challenged with this question by our boss (or our client):

- How do I know that my investment in content will guarantee a positive return? ...& how can I *MEASURE* it?

[Read more..]
Well.. When it comes to "content marketing" that we do here at @ahrefs - I can see at least 10 different areas where it generates a "return" for us.

Can they all be properly measured though?

Good question!

Let's come back to it after listing those 10 "areas of return" first.
1. Our content brings us new customers (duh!)

Our articles rank well in Google and generate a consistent stream of relevant "leads."

And as long as we promote the functionality of our product within those articles - there's almost no way for us to not get "conversions."
Read 16 tweets
20 Nov 20
Here's why you SHOULD NOT prioritise your keyword ideas based on Search volume metic..

Let's look at these two keywords:

🔸 squeeze page - 1.7k
🔸 submit website to search engines - 1.1k

The former should bring more traffic should you rank for it.

Right?

Wrong!

[A THREAD] Image
The average TOTAL search traffic that the top5 ranking pages for the keyword "squeeze page" get is...

436 visits/month (in the US)

(as estimated by @ahrefs) Image
The average TOTAL search traffic that the top5 ranking pages for the keyword "submit website to search engines" get is...

4,600 visits/month (in the US)

(as estimated by @ahrefs)

^ and that is with the outlier page not included in the calculation. Image
Read 5 tweets
28 Oct 20
How we used Twitter to help launch Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (our new freemium product)..

..and generate ~15,000 registrations in the first 48 hours!

A thread 🙂 Image
Step 1 - The countdown.

This product launch was a pretty big deal for us, so we decided it would be cool to "tease" the upcoming release with a "countdown" on Twitter.

We designed 5 pictures with numbers from 5 to 1 and shared them one by one at @ahrefs Twitter account. ImageImageImageImage
Each of these tweets got around 30-40k Impressions and 1.5-2.5k Engagements.

Both ourselves and our community had quite a bit of fun guessing what we were about to launch. 😆

Looking back, I wish we'd run ads on this countdown to reach even more people and generate more buzz. Image
Read 10 tweets

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